‘Don’t worry if you are being called early for vaccination’
SOME people are being called for their vaccination early when they probably do not need to be in a priority group, Health & Social Care president Al Brouard has said.
Also, the vaccination figures that Deputy Brouard presented at last week’s press conference were incorrect.
‘A tabulation error was identified that had resulted in some doses being double counted last week,’ he explained.
As a result, the published results on Monday showed a reduction of the total number of doses of around 3,400.
‘The total number of doses published today is 26,769,’ he confirmed, apologising for the mistake.
He acknowledged that there are still people scratching their heads as to why they have been called forward to book a vaccine appointment when they do not consider themselves to have any underlying or previous health conditions.
Group 6 is currently being vaccinated, which includes those who are considered to be at ‘moderate risk’.
‘Identifying those people considered to be at moderate risk isn’t a quick and easy job,’ he said.
‘It relies on a lot of data gathered over time from different care providers for thousands and thousands of patients.’
With local GP practices and their IT providers, the States worked with the UK to deliver the vaccine and applied a Public Health England-approved algorithm to sift through the data and determine who should be included in Group 6.
‘The algorithm goes through the data much faster than we could do manually but it’s throwing up anomalies, particularly in Guernsey where we are not applying it into an NHS database, which the algorithm was designed for.’
This means some people being called for their vaccinations when they did not need to be.
‘It may be because of a health condition you’ve previously had, or medicine you were prescribed that is showing on your records a long time ago.’ he said.
‘We are not too concerned and for those who have been called, you should also not worry.
‘It’s not ideal, but we are moving at such a pace through our vaccination programme that the most effective and efficient thing to do is, for those who have been invited for their vaccine – rightly or wrongly – to still take up the appointment and get it done.’
Those who genuinely should not be categorised in the moderate-risk group were assured that they were not slowing down the vaccination roll-out.
‘In fact, if we stop and try and re-assess all of the thousands within group 6, that would really slow things down and we’re proposing to do that,’ Deputy Brouard said.
